Fundraising update

Over a year ago I did some refresher training in fundraising on “writing a successful fundraising application”, “winning grants from trusts and foundations”, and “developing a fundraising strategy”. All very useful and highlighted particular areas we the organisations I work with need to improve and do more work to meet funders’ minimum expectations. Nothing we couldn’t do, but it would need a shift in focus and energy, and some new people with specific skills and experiences on (the) board.

There’s no lack of vision, but one of the difficulties with this sort of thing generally in the charity and voluntary sector (in my experience) is that everyone is very busy doing the good work that needs to be done every day and week and month, which leaves very little time or headspace, if any, to work on how to bring the bigger picture to life, to make it happen.

Another difficulty for us has been that one of our key organisations is going through a difficult leadership transition, which effectively means they are out of the strategic picture, at least until that is resolved. That’s likely to be months if not longer.

This year I started fundraising efforts for new youth work. But rather than work on what it would take to make it happen, developing a case for support, and making sure we have all the building blocks of good governance in place, we excitedly jumped straight into finding out what money is out there and shooting off a few half-baked applications.

One thing that seems to have changed since my previous fundraising efforts fifteen years ago is that then it was difficult to get grants for continuing existing work - everyone wanted new projects. Now, it seems that funders all expect you to have a track record delivering the very work you want new funding for. I guess that’s what fifteen years of neoliberal austerity politics does!

Thankfully, now, we have agreed to work on developing our fundraising (and organisational) strategy and getting our own house in order before we start applying in earnest again. This will delay any new fundraising income for us, but that is offset by our current sole funder happily allowing us to repurpose money that was originally earmarked for different work to fund the initial youth work set up instead.

Twice in the last two weeks my boss has called me the team’s anchor.

At least that’s what I think he said.

The funder who changed the closing date has rejected our grant application as it was submitted late.

No great loss as it’s confirmed now (and we kind of knew it already) that our project proposal would have very little chance of success anyway.

So far so good

Six weeks into my new full-time role at work with the additional two days a week focussed on fundraising for a new youth work.

I’ve scoped about 15 potential grant funders, small and large, and submitted 4 applications or pre-applications.

It seems to be grant application season as many of the closing dates are in February and March.

Unfortunately, one funder switched their closing date to Thursday last week after previously advertising it as Friday (The Wayback Machine agrees with me). Another closed their online form the day before or on the morning of their published closing date (Friday). Luckily, perhaps, they didn’t remove the live application form page I had bookmarked so I could still submit.

It will be annoying if our applications are disregarded in these two cases, although the lesson is don’t wait until deadline day.

I’m not beating myself up about it. We only had a few days to put something together, and I was chasing/waiting on my boss to draft and agree final wording. It’s a learning curve for all of us, and lots we can do better.

AI tools were genuinely helpful, and also provided useful feedback on our applications - need to remember to do that step before submitting them next time.

Still setting up this bloody laptop.

Setting up a new laptop for a colleague at work. A very sleek and lightweight Lenovo V15 G4.

A better all round social work experience for everyone involved. They should be able to move to a four day week.

Ealing Council slashes admin work by 44% with new AI tool ealing.nub.news

I just used Voicenotes.com on my phone to record various training prices from historical invoices reading them off my laptop screen, asked it to create a summary, copied into NotebookLM to sort and make a pretty table I could paste into Sheets, then tidied up the presentation.

Then asked Gemini to research three equivalent types of training from external providers, copied responses into Docs, imported Docs into NotebookLM and got a second shiny table for comparison.

Productivity through the roof.

Once it can make coffee and bring cake to the table, and make off-the-cuff wisecracks, I will be expendable.

Back home early from work after second meeting had been cancelled without anyone telling anyone else. So we were all sat there like lemons for twenty minutes until someone asked if we were going to get started. 🤦‍♂️

Oh, and printed a couple of things I’ll need later on our new home printer - only to discover the kids have used up all the colour already printing off photos of planets.

I could use the printer at work, but it’s almost certain not to work when I actually need it to work.